Better Late Than Never

Never let it be said that here at 14,000 Phillies we don’t take note when a Phillie does something historic. True, we might be a little slow in publicly recognizing the particular event, but we’ll get there eventually. Case in point: on Friday night, Ryan Madson became the Phillies all-time career leader in relief appearances, passing Tug McGraw for the #1 spot. Given that he’s a free agent, he’s represented by Scott Boras and the Phillies already have a significant amount of money guaranteed to various players in 2012, there’s a good chance that his run with the team will end after this postseason. Hopefully, that won’t be the case. However, he is now 31 and the last thing the Phillies need to do is spend a lot of money on a player on the wrong side of his prime years — they already did that with Lidge and Contreras. On the other hand, Madson did give a hometown discount to the club when he became a free agent after the 2008 season. It will be interesting to see where that goes.

By the way, I used the Gold parallel of his rookie card knowing full well I haven’t followed up on my last post about parallels. Rest assured that it is coming — I just got a little distracted by the 14,000 Phillies Originals project.